Prologue: the hardest day of my life

Musings on motherhood following the birth of my daughter

The following is a potential prologue for a book I want to write. Would you read it?

“It is always darkest just before the day dawns” - Thomas Fuller

Prologue

It’s October 5th, 2021, a beautiful fall day in the coastal town of Pacifica where I live with my family, but I couldn’t care less about the weather. I am sitting on the floor in my bedroom, hyperventilating and taking huge heaving sobs whenever I am able to catch my breath. I am exhausted, anxious, completely overwhelmed and unable to calm down. I can hear my newborn daughter crying - no, screaming - in her nursery. She is three days old. My two-year-old son is coughing and wheezing in his bedroom. He has Croup. The doctor has prescribed steroids to help him breathe and, after we forced him down and pumped a lungful into his mouth, he is mercifully calm.

My body is still sore and bleeding from birth. My breasts are massively swollen. I haven’t slept more than an hour at a time in three days. Panicky thoughts are racing through my head. What if my daughter catches what my son has? She seems so small and fragile; just 6 pounds at birth. Will she survive? What if I catch it? My body is already so maxed out, if I get sick I won’t be able to take care of them, and who will help? My husband is on paternity leave and, though well-intentioned, he is woefully lacking in breasts, an essential tool for calming a screaming baby. Even though my two-year-old son was weaned more than a year ago, he still wants the comfort of his mother more than he wants his father. My own mother has flown the coupe. She and my father have come to stay with me and help but the situation was too intense for her. In retrospect, I probably expected too much of her, and I probably wasn’t very nice or grateful, strung out as I was. The details are fuzzy. All I remember is that she left, leaving me with my sick toddler, my fragile newborn baby, and two well-intentioned but relatively unhelpful men. 

I log into my meditation app. Maybe a short guided meditation will help me calm myself down? I listen to the woman’s contrived, sugary voice. She says, “just know that right now, there is nothing you have to do, and nowhere you have to be.” I feel like screaming at her. What do you mean? I am supposed to be out there right now comforting my screaming baby and my sick toddler! What kind of stupid, male-centric guided meditation is this anyway? I am not some frazzled tech worker trying to breathe away the seemingly all-important imperatives of my overly-ambitious boss. I am dealing with life and death here! I turn it off and continue my sobbing. I can’t do this, I keep thinking, I am going to die. 

I did not die. As I sit here writing this, I am happy and well. My children are now two and four years old. They are beautiful, strong, healthy, and willful. I love them more than I have ever loved anything and I am deeply grateful to have them in my life. The first year of my daughter’s life was, without question, the hardest I have ever lived through, but from where I sit now, I suddenly feel like it was all worth it. My life is still unquestionably harder than it was before having children, but it also feels more meaningful, sprinkled with moments of intense joy and pride. 

Nevertheless, the struggle of that year left a bitter taste in my mouth and a slew of unanswered questions in my mind. I couldn’t quite shake the notion that something was wrong with my experience. It didn’t make sense. Wasn’t this the one thing that my body had evolved to do? Human mothers have been birthing and raising children since the origin of the species. Every year, 140 million mothers around the world give birth. Did they all struggle as much as I had? I am a healthy, capable woman, with a kind and helpful husband, a comfortable home, and excellent paid maternity leave thanks to my cushy corporate job. If I was suffering, how were other women coping? I knew from anecdotes from friends and stories in the press that mothers were struggling, especially in countries like America with no federal leave policy, but why? Why is human birth and childcare so hard? How could evolution have been so cruel to women? 

As an undergraduate at Stanford I majored in Human Biology. I was a research assistant for Robert Sapolsky, author of the best-selling book “Behave: the biology of humans at their best and worst,” and a teaching assistant for his class on the same subject. His teaching and writing had a profound impact on how I view the world, and how I think about the human experience. In one of his earliest books, “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers,” he explains how the human stress response evolved over millions of years to be well-adapted for coping with fight-or-flight scenarios, but in modern post-industrial societies where we are exposed to chronic stressors, this same system, when turned on too frequently and for too long, predisposes us to a range of chronic diseases and causes millions of early deaths. This process, by which a previously adaptive trait becomes maladaptive in novel environments, is often referred to as “evolutionary mismatch” and the diseases arising from it are sometimes referred to as “mismatch diseases” (see research by Dr. Lieberman). Another common example is diet and exercise. Millions of years of evolution conditioned us to seek out high-calorie foods, store them as fat, and to take it easy whenever possible, as means of further conserving calories. Such adaptations served us well in environments where high-calorie foods were hard to come by and obtaining them required considerable effort, but in contemporary post-industrial environments like America, where high-calorie foods are abundant, and energy-saving devices like cars are the norm, these traits have become maladaptive. My question was, could contemporary motherhood be a giant case of evolutionary mismatch?

These thoughts were in the back of my mind as I went about the grueling task of caring for a newborn baby and toddler. Though I don’t remember being consciously aware of it, at least not in any well-articulated form, I had a growing instinct that what I was experiencing, what so many mothers in contemporary America were experiencing, was somehow out of alignment with our evolutionary past. From somewhere deep inside me, there was a drive to understand more. On the one hand, I knew that living in alignment with the things our bodies had evolved for over millions of years was generally good (though not always) for our mental and physical health. I also knew that evolution operates on differential reproductive success, and so the one thing we were literally made to do in this world, more than anything else, was reproduce. 

“So what?” my husband asked as I tried to make sense of these thoughts with him on a walk around the block one day, “Evolution doesn’t care if you are struggling, as long as you pass on your genes. Life is a struggle for existence.” 

He’s right. All you have to do is watch a nature documentary to know this is true. The baboon mother, who has just given birth, fights the dominant male for the right to access a few licks of water and save her dehydrated body from certain death, all while clutching a newborn infant to her stomach. The octopus mother fans her eggs tirelessly until they hatch, starving herself to death in the process. The whale mother goes without eating for months, while simultaneously producing 200 liters of milk for her ravenous calf every day. As for human mothers? We die in childbirth, at alarming rates compared to any other primate species, and if we are lucky enough to survive the ordeal we are left to care for extremely immature and underdeveloped babies. Perhaps this is just the price we pay for efficient bipedal walking and big brains (more on this later). 

Still, I wasn’t satisfied with this answer. Industrialization has allowed humans to remove themselves from the daily struggle for survival in which most animals remain trapped, and yet I was crushed by the burden of caring for my newborn baby and toddler. If I was struggling, with access to a refrigerator full of food, grocery delivery at the click of a button, living inside a safe, temperature-controlled home, then how on earth would our Paleolithic ancestors have managed it? 

Part of the problem was that I was laboring under the erroneous notion that human mothers would have been popping out babies every two years, from when they first got their periods at age twelve until they hit menopause. Another, bigger issue, was that I was under the false impression that lone mothers raising huge broods of children in single-family homes (my grandmother is one of thirteen) was normal and had persisted in some form throughout most of evolutionary history. Sure, I had heard people repeat the phrase, “it takes a village,” and there was some superficial discussion in my communities about how mothers used to have more help, but what did that even mean? I hadn’t come across any books or research on the topic. Every book on my radar - everything recommended to me by family, friends and professionals -  seemed to focus on achieving the best possible outcomes for the children, with no mention of how to cope as a new mom. And where was this village anyway?

As soon as I had recovered from the year of hell, and my brain function had mostly returned (at least on good days), I went looking for answers. I found a slew of books on topics like mothering the new mother, postnatal depletion, and how to be a “slacker mom,” but none of them answered my questions satisfactorily.

And then I struck gold.

I don’t even remember how it came to be on my nightstand, but one evening, after the kids were in bed, I picked up Melvin Konner’s Evolution of Childhood and a light went on in my brain. The book is chalk full of well-researched anthropological accounts of motherhood and childrearing in hunter gatherer societies around the world. The data were surprising. Some things I knew, but other findings blew me away. These were the answers I had been looking for. Suddenly everything made sense. I wanted to learn more. I wanted to read his sources, the work of his contemporaries, everything I could get my hands on. I wanted to compare this knowledge with what we know from the archeological record and genetic analysis. I wanted to share this information with every mom friend I met at the park. Why wasn’t this common knowledge? Were other people as interested as I was? 

Years of informal mom chats at the playground, combined with exploration of this topic via my Substack newsletter and Instagram account, have been sufficient to convince me that yes, other people are interested, and so I got to writing. What you have in your hands is the culmination of several years of personal inquiry, combined with serious academic research, on the following topic:

Why is contemporary motherhood so challenging, and what can we learn from our deep evolutionary past?

The goal of this book is not to offer pragmatic, every-day solutions for your self-care (as if a bubble bath could solve our problems), nor is this a parenting book aimed at producing the world’s smartest, grittiest, most successful children (though we will touch on topics of parenting). Rather, this book is intended to help mothers understand why the struggle of contemporary motherhood is not normal, and how society, following the transition to agriculture and industrialization, has shortchanged us. My intention is that mothers reading this book will feel seen, that their suffering and struggles will be validated, and they can begin to lift the enormous burden of guilt associated with feeling like we cannot do it all, cannot give enough, cannot cope, and therefore are somehow failing our children, when in reality it’s society that has failed us. I believe that any psychological theory, any parenting book, or any advice given to mothers that does not take this into account is given in bad faith, because it fails to recognize that contemporary mothers have been handed an impossible task, one at which we are bound to fail without help, and this in no way our fault. The transition to agricultural and industrial societies stripped mothers of the tools and support that we evolved to rely on over millions of years, predisposing us to mental illness and stress, and it’s time we started recognizing and acknowledging this, rather than internalizing the patriarchal message that it’s all our responsibility and all our fault, and that failure to cope with the transition to motherhood is some kind of personal and moral failing. It’s not. 

That said, I do also hope to offer a pragmatic path forward for mothers who are struggling. Many of the most crucial components that empower a new mother to cope are outside of her individual control, and can only be guaranteed through some combination of collective action and activism. We need more mothers to speak up about their experiences, to lobby their government and employers for change. There are other things we can do at a local level, through collective organization outside the political system, by building support groups, play groups, and fostering social connection between women, children, parents, caregivers, and educators. Finally, there are some things that we can do at the individual and household level. Without collective action and social change, these individual choices and actions are likely to fall far short of what most mothers need, but some may find them helpful, even lifesaving, in the absence of broader social shifts or community organizing. 

I hope you find this book useful and the research it contains to be as illuminating as it was for me. Although much of the research presented here can feel sad or even disheartening, my intention is that you walk away empowered, and a little bit angry, ready to release some of the guilt and become a catalyst for change, in whatever small way you can manage. Thank you for your attention and time. I know how valuable those resources are to new mothers. I appreciate your willingness to explore these topics with me, and I hope you find it worth your while.